Jonathan Hordle/ITV
This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
It took less than 24 hours for The Spectator Magazine to work out that, based on Rishi Sunak’s own calculations, the Conservatives will be forced to raise taxes by £3,000 to fund their policies if they are elected in July – a thousand pounds more than the £2,000 figure used by the Prime Minister as an attack line during Tuesday night’s leader’s debate.
The publication, which is usually of a conservative persuasion, cautioned the PM against doing a Vote Leave tribute act by using mythical numbers based on back of a fag packet calculations. “There are serious issues at stake in this general election and the Tories have just released nonsense figures with fake attribution then given them to newspapers, who took it on trust”, editor Fraser Nelson wrote. “I’m not sure that this will help their chances.”
Personally, I’m not sure I agree. Sunak was allowed to make the spurious tax claims on multiple occasions on ITV before he got a rise out of Sir Keir Starmer, and it clearly hit home with members of the public who voted him the (albeit marginal) winner of the debate in a snap poll. Tax also featured on the front pages of four major national newspapers the morning after the leader’s debate, with the Mail, Times, Express and Telegraph seemingly unable to deploy the basic fact-checking processes put to work at The Spectator. Sure, there were plenty of people on Twitter decrying the phoney statistic, but they were made up of the same cohort of people who flagged the £350 million a week to the NHS claim in 2016 – and the lie won then.
But there remains an inescapable reality for whoever takes the keys to Number 10 next month – one that can be quite easily solved without having to kick up a stink on the tele. There is a black hole in Britain’s public finances. Independent analysis by the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has unveiled a massive gap between party promises and any sort of explanation on how failing public services will be paid for. Either we prepare to saddle more debt, raise taxes or spend less, but it can’t be none of the above, which suggests some fiscal manoeuvering may indeed be required.
Last month I spoke to Phil White of the campaign group Patriotic Millionaires about why he is among the very few members of the public who actually wants his tax to go up. “At the end of the day,” he said, “this is about the kind of society I want to live in. I don’t want to hide away in my big house watching TV by myself or with other millionaires while people are having to visit food banks or heat banks. I want our children to mix freely, sharing the same excellent schools and hospitals, driving on the same decent roads, and depending on the same excellent police force – all things a strong tax system pays for.”
And he’s not alone. According to new research, three in five British millionaires think economic growth can’t happen without tax rises and 63 per cent support the idea of a wealth tax. Figures suggest levying a tax of just 2 per cent on the 350 people included in the Sunday Times Rich List alone could raise nearly £16 billion – enough to recruit 10,000 new teachers and cover the cost of repairing Britain’s crumbling schools. The research also shows that in the last three decades, the wealth of the 200 richest families in the UK has grown from £42 billion to £711 billion, while the public wealth of the country has fallen from £337 billion to -£1.01 trillion. It really doesn’t stretch credulity to suggest that therein lies the answer.
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